Quotes from Mary Renault

All these years you have made a boy of him. But with me, he shall be a man

For I had felt too much and reasoned too little, hearing what I was ready to hear, not what had been said. There

I was a king and a king's heir and now I am a slave.

They say women forget the pain of childbirth. Well, they are in nature's hand. No hand took mine. I was a body of pain in an earth and sky of darkness. It will take death to make me forget.

Man's immortality is not to live forever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.

Do you know that old song about Orpheus, how he played his lyre on the mountainside, and found a lion had crouched at his feet to listen? I'm no Orpheus, I know; but sometimes I see the lion's eyes. Where did it go, after the music, what became of it? The story doesn't say.

The world had broken; the pieces lay like shattered gold, spoil for the strongest.

It had come to him that no one would ever look from these eyes but he: that among all the lives, numerous beyond imagination, in which he might have lived, he was this one, pinned to this single point of infinity; the rest always to be alien, he to be I.

Now for the first time he realized how important it had been not to admit any alternative to the hard, decent, orthodox choice which need not be regarded as a choice at all; how important not to be different.

I should think more crimes have probably been committed by chaps with inferiority complexes trying to demonstrate their virility, than even for money.

It can be good to be given what you want; it can be better, in the end, never to have it proved to you that this is what you wanted

What is democracy, Lysis?"—"It is what it says, the rule of the people. It is as good as the people are, or as bad.

Plato, in his opinion, had committed too much to love.

That is the life of the gods, who only seem to die like the sun at his setting. But do not ride too fast across the sky and leave us all in darkness.

In his imagination the pages were printed not with their own paragraphs only, but with all that he himself had brought to them: it seemed as though he must be identified and revealed in them, beyond all pretence of detachment, as if they were a diary to which he had committed every secret of his heart.

Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal. - Herakles

you'll get into this morbid state when you think if you want something, then you shouldn't have it.

Alexander offered him (Aristotle)a hand to mount the gangplank, and tried the effect of a smile. When the man returned it, it could be seen that smiling was what he would do best; he would not often be caught with his head back laughing. But he did look like a man who would answer questions.

Speak for me, Nikeratos. Someone's soul is always listening." Someone's always is, I suppose, if one only knew. Plato never forgot it.

A young man sat down beside him on the divan and, without any kind of preliminary, said, 'Is it a queer book?' 'No,' said Laurie. 'Oh,' said the young man, on a note of utter deflation. He got up and went away.

temptation, that in itself it is nothing but an opportunity for choice; so it is rather defeatist to feel very guilty about it, as though one were half ready to commit the sin.

That there are fashions in admiration and denigration is inevitable; they should not however be followed at the expense of truth.

May the Mother curse him and all gods below, and may Night's Daughters hunt him down into the ground! And on the hand that sheds his blood let there be a blessing.

A starving man won't notice a dirty plate.